From VS Code to Helix

> Being a lazy person, I never bothered looking up VS Code shortcuts. Because the learning curve for Helix is slightly steeper, you have to learn those shortcuts that make moving around feel so easy.

This doesn't make sense: if you were truly lazy, you wouldn't spend any effort learning a more complicated app, you'd simply not switch!

> with a few knobs for minor preferences. I am subject to choice paralysis, so making me configure an editor before I’ve even started editing is the best way to tank my productivity.

There are a couple of hundreds of options https://docs.helix-editor.com/editor.html and even more hundreds of keybinds https://docs.helix-editor.com/keymap.html to reconfigure, so you can knob yourself to death with Helix just like with any other configurable app. And the way out is the same as with vim - just pick someone else who has done it and has published the results before dying and use those!

I'm not sure I follow the argument being made here.

"I don't like vim as you need to install plugins to make it work"

"helix is a dumb editor, so it needs a language server."

Then they go and list the number of plugins they install. This seems to argue against what their main point

I now use VScode most of the time, however to me its a fancy VIM variant, because I'm so used to vim bindings.

I can and do use raw vim, although not for any serious programming recently. If I were then I'd have syntastic installed and possibly some more advanced linter.

However! If it makes them happy, then this is a good thing™.

Helix and other new editors (kakoune comes to mind) always appealed to me because they seemed to have slightly more intuitive approaches to editing than vim, but I just don't think I can ever switch, purely because vim just exists everywhere I need it. It (or vi) is installed on practically every system I ever touch by default, and almost every IDE/editor under the sun supports vim keybinds either natively or via well-maintained plugins.

It's the same problem with keyboard layouts: I'm sure I could learn to be slightly faster on dvorak/colemak, but nothing beats the convenience of always having guaranteed access to qwerty, everywhere I go.

> Microsoft is also based in the USA, and the political climate over there makes me want to depend as little as possible on American tools. I know that’s a long, uphill battle, but we have to start somewhere.

I miss the days when we had militant, but more entertaining zealots like Stallman. Whatever else you can say about his antics, Stallman was comitted. And that craziness wrapped back around to being entertaining.

Now we just get whatever this is - basically the equivalent of someone declaring they're going to try being vegetarian by not eating the tips of chicken wings anymore. Like dude, fork Vscode and start hosting it on your own custom vc system that was hacked together as a side project.

Where's the fire and passion behind the resistance?

Helix is great if you just want something fast that gets out of your way. If you want plugins and integrations and other magic, it's probably not for you. I used Vim for the past decade, because it fits the way my brain works. Helix captures that same spirit, but with some polish and friendliness that can only come from starting fresh, and abandoning years of entrenched design decisions.

Helix is a fantastic terminal-based editor. I would rather type in mittens than use a GUI editor. If that resonates with you, maybe give it a try. If you love your GUI, I don't think Helix will be the thing that changes your mind.

I do almost all my development on JetBrains IDEs (Rust, Python, Kotlin). IME they are unmatched for giving you code insights and suggested fixes (combined with "click here to do that") out of the box. But they are absolute resource hogs and I don't trust that they (or their best features) will always remain free.

I've tried to get into neovim a few times. It's fine for basic editing and I use it a bit when I am ssh'd into a box without a graphical environment, or I'm just not bothered booting up a full IDE. But the UI still feels less intuitive to me than JetBrains, and by the time I've installed and configured the various plugins that should give me anything approaching JetBrains' functionality the whole setup feels very fragile, like it could break at any moment and I wouldn't easily be able to fix it. In the regard, Helix having more stuff OOTB feels like it could be a definite improvement.

I used Helix for a couple of days and really liked it for the most part. However, I would sometimes encounter a small, simple thing that I do without thinking in VS Code but just did not know the command for in Helix. I would look it up, think, "Sweet, that's efficient" and move on. This kept happening and finally I was in a situation where I just needed to move fast and did not have time to investigate how to do it in Helix so I switched back and... never returned.

It was a learning curve issue for me, not a functionality issue. I'll probably return at some point (like when the EOY season becomes slower and I have more time to explore) but for now I'm back to cruising in VS Code.

I have a similar story but with neovim (and for the same reason as the author; growing unease with big tech). Tried and failed to make the switch a few times but made a concerted effort to stick with it throughout a specific project and now it’s second nature. I found it useful to research idiomatic (n)vim ways of doing things whenever I’d get frustrated or feel I’d be doing something more quickly in VSCode and commit them to memory by using new commands a few times over. Right now I’d say search/replace is the only thing that’s still not as ergonomic for me in vim as it is in Code. What I do is visually highlight my search phrase, hit asterisk then :%s//replaced - I learned that you can omit the search pattern using this technique.

Anyway nvim and helix are both amazing and terminal editors are both cool and sexy, so why wouldn’t you? ;)

I'm a mostly happy helix user - but I'm still struggling to get debugging to work - both with ruby/rails and typescript/node (Adonis).

Apparently DAP protocol support has been merged - but I find the documentation lacking, and afaik for typescript/javascript it won't work out of the box, as helix needs a pointers to the dap server (and that can't simply be in PATH)?

How are everyone debugging with Helix?

https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/discussions/9269

A few days ago I was randomly reading about ed (after stumbling with the 'ed is the standard editor' joke) and reflecting over how much historical baggage we accumulate in computing.

Commands like a for appending text are unchanged from the teletype era, which are so old that most people don't know computers used printers as an output before screens!

It's pushed me to learn about projects that try to move beyond acumulated baggage and rethink principles.

I've been taking a look at Nushell for example, and even though I was initially skeptical of Helix because of how universal vim commands are, perhaps it's time to take a deeper look.

The best part of this article for me is the link to these well made 3rd party docs for helix.

https://helix-nikita-revencos-projects.vercel.app/start-here...

Just yesterday I think I reached the breaking point with vim. Been using vi and derivatives for 40 years, but the amount of tweaking to get a usable setup is really annoying me. I've gotten to the point where LSP is a must have.

Yesterday I was trying to switch my Astro VIM setup from using black to using "ruff format", which lead me down the path of installing astro from scratch, re-configuring it for my "must haves", and then trying again to get my formatter switched to ruff. I reinstalled because the docs looked like there may be a new way to do it since my last install 6 months ago.

The documentation for Astro VIM is really incomplete. Claude was fairly helpful, maybe Claude Code would be better, since it'll have the context of my exact configs rather than Claude giving me 3-5 options for making the change.

I've got a helix cheatsheet on my desk that I had Claude make me ~3 months ago. I started my work journal in helix this morning, but the install on that system must be broken because I couldn't even exit insert mode, pressing ESC did nothing.

I'm at the point where I think vim is a great library for building a text editor, but nobody has built a great text editor in it yet. I really liked LunarVim but that got abandoned for reasons I don't fully understand.